The pages of an electronic commerce Web site through which products and/or services are offered for sale typically comprise a plurality of separate Web pages. The pages are arranged in a hierarchical fashion to facilitate navigation by a consumer to a page containing information about the product or products of interest to that consumer. For instance, an e-commerce Web site for a department store, which typically offers thousands of different products for sale, may comprise hundreds of Web pages (commonly constructed on the fly), each containing one or more hyperlinks that enable a consumer to navigate from a broad focus to the narrow focus by use of the hyperlinks. For example, at the highest level, the Web site may have a single home page containing various graphics and general interest text information about the department store and a series of hyperlinks to pages with more specific information. For instance, the top level home page may contain hyperlinks labelled “About Us”, “Employment Opportunities”, “Products”, “Contact Us”, etc. Each of those hyperlinks will take the consumer to another page containing more specific information corresponding to the heading of the hyperlink.
Each of those secondary pages may contain a multiplicity of hyperlinks to further pages containing even more specific information within that category. For instance, the page corresponding to the “Products” hyperlink may contain a plurality of links to further pages containing and corresponding to specific types of products. For instance, the “Products” page may contain a horizontal navigation bar near the top or vertically along the left side of the page containing a plurality of hyperlinks entitled “Clothing”, “Housewares”, “Electronics”, “Hardware”, “Automotive”, etc. The pages addressed by each of these hyperlinks comprises content (e.g., text, graphics, multimedia) pertinent to the particular category identified by the hyperlink (e.g., clothes for the “Clothing” hyperlink). The page corresponding to the “Clothing” hyperlink may contain another navigation bar that provides hyperlinks to further narrowed categories, such as “Women”, “Men”, “Children”.
The pages may be linked in this hierarchical fashion so Web surfers can readily navigate to a page containing information about the particular product(s) of interest.
Of course, the Web site also is enabled to allow the consumer to actually purchase the product by, for instance, clicking on a BUY “button” which hyperlinks to an “Order Form” page on which the consumer can enter credit card and other information so that the Web site operator can create a purchase order and/or invoice and thereafter mail the selected product(s) to the purchaser.
In most cases, the actual collection of hyperlinks that enable the hierarchical navigation through the Web site consumes a very small portion of the page. As noted above, it is typically provided in a navigation bar that runs across the top of the page. Another common scheme is to provide a navigation bar in the same or a separate frame running vertically along the left edge of the page. Typically, it is not until the consumer has navigated to a page pertaining to a relatively specific topic, e.g., “Belts” in the hierarchy of “Home”→“Products”→“Clothing”→“Men”→“Dress Wear”→“Office Casual”→“Accessories”→“Belts”, before any significant portion of the page is actually used for displaying information about the specific products to which the user has navigated.
Accordingly, the vast majority of the space on most of the Web pages of an e-commerce site can be used for advertising and other marketing purposes. Electronic commerce Web site professionals commonly call this large portion of the page that is used for advertising and the like the “Featured Product” area of the page and use that space to advertise products or services that are on sale or new products/services or new categories of products/services or anything else that might lead the consumer to make an additional purchase from that Web site. Thus, it should be understood that the term Featured product is not intended to be limited to products per se, but refers more broadly to any special information, such as new or sale products/services, employment opportunities, or any information that the Web site operator believes may be of interest to visitors to the Web site.
Typically, the Featured Product area of each page contains images and textual information about a small number of “special” products or offers that are related to the particular category of that page. Electronic commerce Web site operators tend to feature somewhere between two and six products in the Featured Product area, and most commonly three or four products. Further, it is common to have the information pertaining to one particular product consume a larger portion of the Featured Product area and smaller areas devoted to two or three other products.
It is desirable for the Featured Product area of different pages within a Web site to have a different “look and feel” in order to attract the consumer's eyes as he or she navigates through the Web site. Specifically, if all of the pages had a similar look and feel to the Featured Product area, the consumer, who is probably concentrating more on navigating to the particular product than looking at the Featured Product areas, may have the impression that the Featured Product areas of all the pages contain the same information and thus be even less likely to look at the featured products.
The Featured Product areas typically contain information about sale items or other special offers that, essentially by definition, are relatively short in duration (i.e., a sale typically may last a day or a week). Hence, the Featured Product areas of the Web pages typically are updated and revised on a regular basis, whereas the navigation bar portion and remainder of the pages remain unchanged over much longer periods.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for facilitating the creation of Web pages and particularly the Featured Product area of electronic commerce Web pages.